No70: Eye of Basir – Quick Game Review

No70: Eye of Basir is an atmospheric first person adventure with some horror elements.

You are searching for your brother who seems to have vanished into thin air. While looking for information, you stumble across an ancient brotherhood that protects a powerful object called the Eye of Basir. I don’t want to give away too many details, but as the story developed, there was the potential for the game to really delve into the supernatural, and psychological horror.

The gameplay feels like that of a walking simulator. The atmosphere may be a little spooky at times, but the game’s attempts at jump scares fall flat. As you play, you will need to find and interact with objects in order to trigger events. You can only interact with the specific items that are intended for immediate use, and you wind up having to do a lot of backtracking to trigger events before you can progress.

On the Steam store page, the game claims to have “difficult puzzles,” but frankly, the “puzzles” are a complete joke. You use an item to view the world a slightly differently, but the majority of the game feels more like a series of fetch quests and item search rather than anything else, and it’s not particularly engaging or enjoyable. I don’t consider walking to pick up an item, and then taking an item to interact with something else to be a challenge at all.

Pros:

the environments look decent

the voice acting for the narrative is okay

the music is good, and the ambience is decent enough, and the atmosphere is sometimes spooky

Cons:

puzzles are practically nonexistent despite the game advertising “difficult puzzles”

lots of backtracking since you need to trigger items/events to progress (for example, in one part in the game, you need to input a 4-digit code, and even though you find the code from a hint, you are forced to do several other tasks before you can actually use the code)

the story never takes advantage of the opportunities to venture further into the supernatural/psychological horror elements, and the story overall winds up being somewhat bland

(nitpick) some minor texture issues, poor anti-aliasing, and some invisible walls that seriously hurt the immersion; the game also lacks basic graphic and audio options aside from just changing the resolution – this lack of options wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for some of the lense flare effects being sometimes blinding, and the blurry vision effects being distracting at times

(nitpick) the controls are not customizable (WASD, shift, M1, M2), and there is only partial controller support right now

The game took me about 2 hours to complete, but there were lots of times where I had to backtrack to click on a specific item, or walk a certain way for events to trigger properly.

Conclusion:

No70: Eye of Basir aspires to be so much more than it actually is. The “puzzles” are nonexistent, the “unique atmosphere” isn’t anything special, and while the psychological horror elements had some potential, they failed to come to fruition. No70: Eye of Basir isn’t a terrible game, but it’s mediocre at best.